Nutanix High Availability and Continuity – Impact on Ops

One of the added benefits of scale-out storage is the addition of multiple storage controllers. When you have more than 2 storage controllers and you lose one due to failure or maintenance like a rolling upgrade, you can do so with minimal impact.

Below are the results of 8-node cluster with 700 desktops running a Login VSI medium workload. One of the 8 storage controllers is shutdown to see the impact on the cluster. No desktops were rebooted or shutdown. IOPS dropped from 2,000 to 1,496 and latency had a brief spike from 4ms to 22.37 ms.

Things to think about for hyperconvergence?

* Is data spread out evenly that additional controllers will help?
* Do you have to vMotion VM’s to preform an upgrade? If so, can you meet your maintenance window?
* Will dependences on the Hypervisor management stack cause you to patch both your control and data plane?